No ESPN+ content this week, as I’m working on the prospect rankings and saving those extra bullets in the hope that someone like Bryce Harper or Manny Machado will eventually sign. I did hold a Klawchat on Thursday.

My latest review for Paste covers the deduction board game Cryptid, one of my top ten games of 2018, in which each player gets one clue, and you need to deduce all other players’ clues to identify the one hex on the variable board where the Creature is hiding for that specific board and set of clues. It’s quite fun, like a board game with a puzzle at its heart.

And now, the links…

• Longreads first: Many of you have already seen Malcolm Gladwell’s story asking if marijuana is really as safe as its supporters claim. His general answer, that we don’t know, is the correct one, and the reason is important: Puritanical federal policy has prohibited not just the use of marijuana but nearly all research into its benefits or side effects for decades. I’m ardently pro-decriminalization, including purging records of people arrested for personal possession, but there is a lot we don’t know about the effects of THC or CBD, and the burgeoning market for marijuana itself and extracts of it would benefit from evidence-based regulation.
• Marie Claire has an excerpt from Abby Ellin’s new book about how she nearly married a con man.
• Gizmodo profiles a family in South Africa whose house is mistakenly identified as the location of over a million IP addresses, a colossal error created, at the start, by the U.S. government.
• ESPN’s Baxter Holmes wrote a delightful piece on the Portland Trail Blazer’s daily coffee routine, which warmed the heart of this coffee snob (I prefer V60 to French press, but let’s not quibble).
• My Twitter friend Jane Coaston has a great piece on Vox about how Tucker Carlson has sparked a big debate on populism within conservative social media circles, arguing – as you would also hear on the progressive side of the debate – that economic inequality is a massive problem for developed countries. She spoke to Carlson, who, when not race-baiting on his Fox News program, always seems thoughtful and intelligent when speaking about serious issues. It’s a shame that person disappears when the red light goes on.
• Nature looks at a father’s efforts against bureaucracy to get access to a novel drug for his two sons, who have a rare genetic disorder called alkaptonuria. The drug in question is nitisinone, which was originally developed as a potent herbicide but disused because of its harmful effects on fish – yet the same pathway it disrupts in plants contains the metabolic error in people with alkaptonuria.
• Craig Calcaterra wrote about the bad news beneath MLB’s record revenues in 2018, signs the revenue may not be sustainable, which could also lead to further labor strife in the sport.
• James Middleton, brother of the Duchess of Cambridge, went public with a first-person account of his battle with depression.
• A 50-year-old French novelist said recently that a 50-year-old woman’s body is “unlovable,” while the body of a 25-year-old woman is “extraordinary.” The Guardian‘s Zoe Williams calls him out on this self-serving, pretentious nonsense, but the real kicker is the caption under the novelist’s photo.
• The central African state of Gabon experienced a failed coup attempt this past week. South Africa’s Mail & Guardian examines why the coup failed, calling the country a “pseudo-state that is still run from Paris.” The family of current President Ali Bongo has ruled the oil- and timber-rich country for 50 years; Bongo’s father, who preceded him as de facto dictator, had 53 recognized children, many of whom run the state and its client companies while drawing off its resources for personal gain.
• There are protests in British Columbia over the building a private pipeline across a First Nations enclave, with RCMP officers clashing with the protestors as the latter try to block access to the building site.
• A Saudi teenager who was granted refugee status by the UN after fleeing her abusive family and holing up in a Thailand hotel room has been granted asylum in Canada. Rahaf al-Qunun says her family abused her and had threatened to kill her for renouncing Islam, sparking her flight from the repressive kingdom.
• This was a big week for anti-vaccine bullshit. There’s a chicken pox outbreak at a Waldorf school in Asheville, NC, a school with a high “vaccine exemption rate,” which would be easily addressed by eliminating non-medical exemptions.
• An Israeli father who didn’t feel well insisted on visiting his prematurely born son in the NICU. It turned out the father had measles, so the hospital chose to vaccinate more than 80 babies even though the MMR vaccine is typically given on a child’s first birthday. (Tangent: I had to get the MMR shot twice, because I’d originally gotten it the day before my first birthday, and the college I attended wouldn’t accept that, so at age 17 I got it again.)
• A longer read on a new anti-vaxxer crank story: Sharyl Attkisson, with whom I was sparring on Twitter this week until she blocked me, styles herself as an “investigative journalist,” but is anything but, as she hosted a program syndicated on Sinclair stations last week (including Seattle’s KOMO) that dredged up the long-discredited hypothesis that vaccines cause autism. Her main “source,” with whom she may not have actually spoken, is Dr. Andrew Zimmerman, who made an extraordinary claim in 2008 about a solitary case of developmental delay in a child with mitochondrial disorder, but again, that hypothesis has also been debunked. There’s a lot of bullshit to unpack in here, but if you read it and have a Sinclair-owned station near you, call or email its news director to voice your objection to them running this fraudulent report.
• Researchers at Dartmouth say they’ve found evidence that hysteresis, where a force’s impact remains even after the force is gone, occurs in the sphere of public opinion, such as the persistent, false belief that vaccines cause autism. Deniers get stuck in a so-called “hysteresis loop,” one that traps them in confirmation bias and makes it extremely difficult to shake them of their delusions.
• A woman whose parents refused to get her vaccinated has gone very public as she’s gotten all her vaccines as an adult. She says that she got the flu “every year” as a kid and has extensive allergies even though one vaccine-denier delusion is that vaccines lead to allergies (they don’t).
• Great news, there’s a new filovirus, like Ebola and Marberg, present in bats in China.
• A bunch of North Dakota legislators (guess) want to require Bible study in public schools. I want them to pass this law just so they can lose spectacularly in court.
• A federal border agent confessed to killing four Latino women he deemed “disposable” back in September, and was only discovered because a potential fifth victim escaped.
• A new study found that people over the age of 65 were much more likely to share fake news online, regardless of party affiliation. That’s unsurprising; as we age, our lateral prefrontal cortices become weaker, reducing our cognitive inhibitions and making us more prone to believe things we’d find obviously false or absurd in our 30s or 40s.
• The Trump Administration’s proposal to allow coal plants and other manufacturers to dump more mercury into the environment is “an affront to economics and the environment” according to Rutgers Professor of Public Policy Stuart Shapiro.
• Jezebel spoke to Wende Curtis, owner of a major comedy club in Denver, about why she turned down Louis CK when his camp approached her about a gig on his would-be comeback tour.
• New York‘s Intelligencer argues that raising the top marginal rate to 70% is actually a moderate, evidence-based idea, citing research that such a rate on extremely high incomes discourages rent-seeking among top executives who are likely to earn seven- or eight-figure salaries.
• I enjoyed the unintentional comedy of this Politico piece on how mainstream Democrats want to “rein in” Rep. Ocasio-Cortez, in large part because they’re afraid she’ll boost primary challenges to Democrats led by more progressive candidates. To which I say: good. And I’d rather have her in front of the cameras proposing new ideas, even ones with which I disagree, than Chuck Schumer delivering more of the same, or, in the highest comedy of the week, the irrelevant Joe Lieberman.
• Tweet of the week:

  [blind date]

  JEFF BEZOS: I brought you flowers

  HER: Oh thanks. That’s very sweet

  JEFF BEZOS: I see you’ve liked flowers. Perhaps you’d like these other flowers

  — Todd ‘Papi’ Carlos (@TheToddWilliams) January 9, 2019